Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein: The Engineer Who Wrote the Genre's Grammar

In July 1969, CBS seated two novelists beside Walter Cronkite to narrate the first moon landing. One was Arthur C. Clarke. The other was a tubercular former naval officer from Butler, Missouri, who had spent two decades writing adventure novels for the boys now flying the spacecraft. "This is the greatest event in human history, up to this time," Robert Heinlein told the country. "This is — today is New Year's Day of the Year One." The Apollo 15 astronauts paid him tribute during their mission. A Mars crater carries his name. Few writers have watched their readership fly their own books.

Annapolis and a Bad Lung

He was born on 7 July 1907 in Butler, Missouri, the third of seven children of Rex Ivar Heinlein, an accountant, and Bam Lyle Heinlein, and grew up in Kansas City. He was initially barred from the United States Naval Academy because an older brother was already there; he got an appointment anyway in June 1925 and graduated in 1929 with the equivalent of an engineering degree, standing fifth academically and twentieth overall — the gap explained by disciplinary trouble.

He served aboard the USS *Lexington* handling radio communications in 1931 and as gunnery officer on the USS *Roper* from 1933 to 1934, reaching lieutenant. Then pulmonary tuberculosis ended it. Discharged in 1934, he spent his hospitalisation designing, among other things, a waterbed. A stab at graduate mathematics and physics at UCLA did not last.

The Socialist Candidate

The Heinlein of the 1930s would be unrecognisable to readers who know only the later libertarian. He worked for Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California movement, served as deputy publisher of *EPIC News*, campaigned when Sinclair took the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1934, and in 1938 ran for the California State Assembly as a left-wing Democrat. He lost by fewer than 500 votes. Losing that race is what turned him into a writer.

Life-Line

"Life-Line" appeared in the August 1939 *Astounding Science Fiction*. He had written it for a contest and then sold it outright for considerably more than the prize. "Misfit" followed in November. Working with the editor John W. Campbell, he was almost immediately recognised as the leader of a new movement toward *social* science fiction — stories in which the interesting variable was human institutions rather than hardware. By February 1940, according to the Heinlein Society, magazine income had paid off his mortgage.

In May 1941 *Astounding* printed his chart of the Future History, a consistent shared timeline into which his stories were slotted — an organising device the genre had never seen. During the war he worked as a civilian at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard alongside Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp.

Out of the Pulp Ghetto

In February 1947 *The Saturday Evening Post* published "The Green Hills of Earth." It made Heinlein the first science fiction writer to escape what the field itself called the pulp ghetto, and he placed four stories there. The same year he began writing one juvenile novel a year for Charles Scribner's Sons, timed for Christmas — *Farmer in the Sky*, *Starman Jones*, *Have Space Suit—Will Travel* and the rest, a run that lasted until 1959 and shaped a generation of American engineers. In 1950 he co-wrote, devised effects for, and served as technical adviser on *Destination Moon*, which won an Academy Award for special effects.

The Three Big Books

*Starship Troopers* (1959) — written in fury at calls to halt nuclear testing unilaterally, rejected by Scribner's as too controversial for its prestige line, published by Putnam — is a sustained argument about civic duty and military service, carried by its protagonist Juan "Johnny" Rico. *Stranger in a Strange Land* (1961), originally titled "The Heretic," was adopted by the counterculture after 1963 and gave English the verb *grok*. *The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress* (1966) staged a lunar colony's revolt as a libertarian parable. The three books are politically incompatible with one another, which did not stop each becoming a foundational text for a different constituency.

Blood, and the Late Books

A peritonitis attack around 1970 nearly killed him and required repeated transfusions of his rare A2-negative blood. He responded by turning himself into a one-man transfusion service: he and his wife Virginia crossed the country reorganising donation drives, and at science fiction conventions fans signed ornate pledge cards to give blood. He hosted a major drive at the 1976 Worldcon in Kansas City. After transient ischaemic attacks in 1977–78 and carotid bypass surgery, he produced five more novels between 1980 and 1987.

Virginia Gerstenfeld, a chemical and rocket test engineer whom he married in 1948, was his first reader and the model for his competent women. She was his third wife; the marriage lasted forty years, until his death.

Why Robert Is Called a Genius

The claim is not stylistic; Heinlein's sentences are serviceable, not beautiful. The achievement is architectural. Borrowing Kipling's indirect exposition, he taught the genre to convey an unfamiliar world through the offhand assumptions of people living inside it, rather than stopping to explain it. The method is now so universal it is invisible, which is the surest evidence of an invention. He also built the Future History, the field's first consistent timeline, and broke science fiction out of the pulps into the *Saturday Evening Post*.

The external measures agree. Four novels won Hugos, seven earlier works took Retro Hugos, and he was made the first SFWA Grand Master in 1974. In a 1953 poll of leading science fiction writers he was named as an influence more often than any other modern author. English absorbed *grok*, *waldo*, *TANSTAAFL* and "pay it forward" from him.

The counter-case is substantial and comes largely from inside the field. The late novels are widely judged didactic — lectures in the author's voice, characters as mouthpieces. His treatment of incest and of relationships begun in childhood repelled peers including de Camp and Damon Knight. His women are contested even by admirers: Farah Mendlesohn reads the stereotypes as set up to be dismantled, while Nancy Kress found *Friday* leaning on "old stereotypes" about women and rape. *Farnham's Freehold*, intended as an attack on racism, misfired with most critics, and his political reasoning often substitutes assertion for argument. Heinlein was a first-rate engineer of narrative and an erratic thinker: the genius is in the machinery, not the doctrine.

Legacy

He died on 8 May 1988 at Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, of emphysema and heart failure, aged eighty, having published thirty-two novels, fifty-nine short stories and sixteen collections. His papers are at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Church of All Worlds, founded in 1962 on the model of *Stranger in a Strange Land*, still exists as a registered religious body. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, who received his manuscript notes for years, wrote him into *Footfall* as a character. And every science fiction novel that trusts its reader to work out the world from context — which is nearly all of them — is running on his invention.

Achievements

• Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award — 1975
• Hugo Award for Best Novel — 1967
• Notable work: Farnham's Freehold
• Notable work: Starship Troopers
• Notable work: Have Space Suit—Will Travel
• Notable work: The Puppet Masters
• Genres: science fiction, fantasy and military science fiction